East African History

Because it is on the coast, East Africa had contacts with India and Egypt and West Asia, and even with China, long before other parts of Africa did. The earliest written evidence we have about East Africa comes from a Roman guidebook for sailors. That’s the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Somebody wrote it, in Greek, about 50 AD. This guidebook describes a number of East African ports, although probably only as far south as modern Kenya. Traders were already buying enslaved men and women from Ethiopia and Kenya. They sold them north in the Roman Empire.

Faras Cathedral in northern Sudan (700s AD)

There is archaeological evidence for a port around 700 AD at Shanga, in modern Kenya. There were only a few people living there. They seem to have kept cattle. Some archaeologists think the people of Shanga had already converted to the new religion of Islam by the 800s AD, although the evidence is not very clear. But they were certainly building an Islamic mosque by the 900s. Sometime around this time, the people of East Africa also began speaking a Bantu language. It became known as Swahili (swah-HEEL-ee).

In 1320 AD or so, the African ruler of the port of Kilwa (in modern Tanzania), al Hasan ibn Suleiman, built himself a great stone palace out of cut coral. The great North African traveller and writer ibn Battuta visited al Hasan there. By 1500 AD, however, Europeans from Portugal had begun to take over the East African ports, which gradually pushed out Islamic and Indian influence.

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Karen Carr is Associate Professor Emerita, Department of History, Portland State University. She holds a doctorate in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Michigan. Follow her on Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter, or buy her book, Vandals to Visigoths.